War on Poverty

A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980

Annelise Orleck

Publication Year: 2011

Lyndon Johnson&rsquo;s War on Poverty has long been portrayed as the most potent symbol of all that is wrong with big government. Conservatives deride the War on Poverty for corruption and the creation of &ldquo;poverty pimps,&rdquo; and even liberals carefully distance themselves from it. Examining the long War on Poverty from the 1960s onward, this book makes a controversial argument that the programs were in many ways a success, reducing poverty rates and weaving a social safety net that has proven as enduring as programs that came out of the New Deal.

The War on Poverty also transformed American politics from the grass roots up, mobilizing poor people across the nation. Blacks in crumbling cities, rural whites in Appalachia, Cherokees in Oklahoma, Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, migrant Mexican farmworkers, and Chinese immigrants from New York to California built social programs based on Johnson&rsquo;s vision of a greater, more just society. Contributors to this volume chronicle these vibrant and largely unknown histories while not shying away from the flaws and failings of the movement&mdash;including inadequate funding, co-optation by local political elites, and blindness to the reality that mothers and their children made up most of the poor.

In the twenty-first century, when one in seven Americans receives food stamps and community health centers are the largest primary care system in the nation, the War on Poverty is as relevant as ever. This book helps us to understand the turbulent era out of which it emerged and why it remains so controversial to this day.

Cover

Contents

Introduction: The War on Poverty from the Grass Roots Up

On a blistering Las Vegas day in 1972, a desolate, dangerous corner of the
city’s black West Side came to life. Sweating, skinny teens carried load
aft er load of garbage out of an abandoned hotel while their mothers, arms laden
with cleaning supplies, set to work making the long- abandoned interior habitable
again. Over the next few months, poor African American women and men ...

Part I. Battles over Community Action

“This Government Is with Us”: Lyndon Johnson and the Grassroots War on Poverty

On a summer morning in late June 1967, President Lyndon Baines Johnson
set out to visit the ghetto. On his way to Texas for a long weekend at his
ranch, Johnson made a side trip to Philadelphia, where he toured the headquarters
of the Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OIC). A community- based
job training program, OIC had been founded three years earlier by a group of ...

“To Challenge the Status Quo by Any Means”: Community Action and Representational Politics in 1960s Baltimore

Proclaiming his desire to fulfill each citizen’s “basic hopes, ones all too oft en
circumscribed by poverty and race”—hopes for “a fair chance,” “fair play
from the law,” “a full-time job on full-time pay,” “a decent home for his family
in a decent community,” “a good school for his children with good teachers,”
and “security when faced with sickness or unemployment or old age”— ...

Ideological Diversity and the Implementation of the War on Poverty in Houston

In Houston, the largest city in the American South, as in other cities and in
some rural communities, the War on Poverty was profoundly shaped by a
multifarious group of local actors that included public officials, financial elites,
grassroots antipoverty activists, program administrators, federal volunteers,
civil rights activists, and poor people themselves. In particular, the Community ...

Defining the Space of Participation in a Northern City: Tejanos and the War on Poverty in Milwaukee

Many of the important social movements of the 1960s played out dramatically
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a midwestern industrial city known for
the brewing of beer. One of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States,
Milwaukee is divided along a north- south axis by the Menomonee River. The
river also divides the city’s two largest minority communities, African ...

Part II. Poor Mothers and the War on Poverty

Saving Babies in Memphis: The Politics of Race, Health, and Hunger during the War on Poverty

Barbara McKinney, who has worked for the same African American community
action organization in South Memphis, Tennessee, for more than
forty years, first encountered severe symptoms of malnutrition among infants
and children in her neighborhood in 1967, when she began visiting homes as
a newly employed neighborhood aide in one of the most poverty- stricken ...

“Someday . . . the Colored and White Will Stand Together”: The War on Poverty, Black Power Politics, and Southern Women’s Interracial Alliances

Few federal programs in the past four decades have been the target of as
much vitriol and distortion as President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s War on
Poverty. Critics on the right deride it as a glaring example of federal waste,
fraud, and misguided handouts to the undeserving poor. Some on the left complain
about the failure to eradicate poverty, while feminists castigate its focus on ...

“Parent Power”: Evelina López Antonetty, the United Bronx Parents, and the War on Poverty

Anyone in New York’s City’s South Bronx in the late 1960s would have
found it hard to miss the “United Bronx Parents” sign at 791 Prospect
Avenue. Stretching across the building’s facade, the large sign hinted at a complex
and until now mostly hidden history of life, politics, and economics in one
of America’s poorest urban communities. This history turns on the desires and ...

Gender, Civil Rights Activism, and the War on Poverty in Los Angeles

Three women of color, Opal Jones, Francisca Flores, and Graciela Olivarez,
made signal contributions to the War on Poverty in Los Angeles. In the
process, these women challenged the racial and gender status quo in that city’s
African American and Mexican American activist communities, in Los Angeles
city government, and in the administration of the federal War on Poverty. Jones, ...

Part III. The War on Poverty, the Civil Rights Movement, and Southern Politics

Poverty Wars in the Louisiana Delta: White Resistance, Black Power, and the Poorest Place in America

A quarter century aft er President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared an unconditional
War on Poverty, the U.S. Census revealed Lake Providence,
Louisiana, to be the poorest place in America. In 1990, an almost four-square-mile
census block covering the town’s southern half earned the troubling distinction
of having the nation’s lowest median annual income, beating out other ...

In 1965, the federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) approved a proposal
to establish a community health center in the all- black town of Mound
Bayou, Mississippi. The center promised to serve impoverished residents of
northern Bolivar County, who had almost no access to medical care. Initiated
and staff ed by civil rights activists, the project sought to move beyond providing ...

Fighting for the Child Development Group of Mississippi: Poor People, Local Politics, and the Complicated Legacy of Head Start

The Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), a network of child
care and educational centers and one of the most controversial programs
to emerge from the Community Action Program (CAP) of the War on Poverty,
began as a hopeful outgrowth of the movement schools established during
the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign. Civil rights activists organized Freedom ...

Going Back to Selma: Organizing for Change in Dallas County after the March to Montgomery

The national history of the civil rights movement is oft en remembered by
using specific locations to explain how racial segregation met its end. In
popular memory, the dramatic events that unfolded in Montgomery, Little
Rock, Birmingham, the Mississippi Delta, Selma, and Memphis are commemorated
most. Museums have been built to explain what happened, monuments ...

The War on Poverty and the Chicano Movement in Texas: Confronting “Tio Tomás” and the “Gringo Pseudoliberals”

In October 1967, U.S. president Lyndon Baines Johnson went to El Paso, Texas,
to meet with Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, the president of Mexico, and Texas governor
John Connally. The purpose of the visit was to return the Chamizal Territory,
a six-hundred-acre strip of land along the Rio Grande, to Mexico. Mexico
had disputed U.S. claims to the land since the late nineteenth century, when the ...

Part IV. What Do They Really Mean by Community Development?

Looking Back to the City in the Hills: The Council of the Southern Mountains and a Longer View of the War on Poverty in the Appalachian South, 1913–1970

Though usually associated with racial minorities in decaying urban centers,
the War on Poverty rhetorically and symbolically began with Appalachia.
Shortly aft er he declared “unconditional war on poverty” in his January 8, 1964,
State of the Union address, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced that
he would “launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of ...

The War on Poverty in Mississippi and Oklahoma: Beyond Black and White

The War on Poverty is typically seen in black and white. Economists and political
scientists marshal statistics to argue that it either succeeded or failed.
Sociologists debate whether the approach taken toward poverty was right or
wrong. These disputes are seldom painted in shades of gray. Historians have
looked through a similar lens. Historical assessments overwhelmingly focus ...

The House That “Equality” Built: The Asian American Movement and the Legacy of Community Action

President Lyndon Baines Johnson liked to quote the prophet Isaiah. “Come,
let us reason together,” Johnson sometimes said (assuming the voice of God)
as he prepared to exercise his famous powers of persuasion.1 But Johnson was
no literalist. Jesus told his disciples that the poor would be “with you always.”
Johnson and the other architects of the Great Society disagreed. Convinced ...

Conclusion: The War on the War on Poverty and American Politics since the 1960s

The War on Poverty and the programs it spawned have had a complicated and
ambivalent history since the 1960s. They have been attacked rhetorically on all
fronts. Politicians across the political spectrum have consistently portrayed Lyndon
Baines Johnson and his Great Society as symbols of all that is wrong with
big government and as arguments against future expansions of federal poverty ...

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